I know historical hindsight is 20/20, but how did no one bully this guy into giving up his moronic "de-stalinisation" policy? Like the SU was built by Stalin and now suddenly hes satan incarnate? No wonder SU citizens lost faith in the party over time, how can you trust a bunch of weather vanes?

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[–] ikilledtheradiostar@hexbear.net 5 points 3 months ago (1 children)

What sort of criticisms got purged?

[–] GayTuckerCarlson@hexbear.net 7 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago) (2 children)

Nikolai Vavilov, a hero of soviet science and creator of hardy strains of wheat, was purged for believing genetics was real

[–] ikilledtheradiostar@hexbear.net 9 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago) (1 children)

was purged for believing genetics was real

That's a pretty interesting claim and sounds pretty wild. Where can I read about the soviets purging genetics believers? You genetics guys gotta be careful ya know.

[–] aaaaaaadjsf@hexbear.net 5 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago) (1 children)

Read about Trofim Lysenko. He said the concept of a gene was bourgeois.

[–] Hexboare@hexbear.net 9 points 3 months ago (2 children)

In private, however, Stalin ridiculed Lysenko’s view that every science had a “class character”, writing on a report by Lysenko: “Ha-ha-ha…And Mathematics? And Darwinism?”

[–] aaaaaaadjsf@hexbear.net 5 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago)

The guy was legitimately a dumbass I don't know why Stalin kept him around and edited his speeches. He caused a ton of harm to agriculture and genetics. His idea on grafting trees has to be one of the most foolish things I've read in a while. Even worse, Khrushchev got rid of him, then brought him back to do more damage for another decade, before getting rid of him again.

[–] Hewaoijsdb@hexbear.net 4 points 3 months ago (1 children)

Source?

[–] Hexboare@hexbear.net 7 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago)

Editing Nature: Joseph Stalin and the "New" Soviet Biology in Isis vol. 84 (4) pp. 728-745 (1993) DOI: 10.1086/356638

https://libstc.cc/#/stc/id.nexus_id:9ko3mb04eo9nsyb1g6wp1by98

He sent this back to Lysenko to remove

[–] Hexboare@hexbear.net 6 points 3 months ago

Vavilov was awarded the Order of Lenin under Stalin and his research institute was established under Stalin as well (that Lysenko came up in).

There's unfortunately not a lot of easily accessible information on the investigation of Vavilov, but if:

you're not a member of the party
you spend a lot of time on international field trips to collect seeds
you spend a lot of time in western countries for research collaboration, and
you're the head of the USSR agricultural institute during the Soviet famine of 1930-33

You should probably have resigned and kept doing field work.

It's reported that Stalin was directly involved in Vavilov's arrest, intervening to support Lysenko, but it's unclear whether this was actually the case - 8 years later, Stalin edited a speech of Lysenko to remove references to what's considered a key factor in Lysenko's popularity

In his original manuscript Lysenko did portray genetics as "bourgeois science" and tried to reduce his conflict with geneticists to the contra-dictions inherent in class antagonisms. But in editing Lysenko's text Stalin deleted the discourse about the class character of science and completely eliminated the word bourgeois in reference to science (it was used in Lysenko's original text twenty-eight times).